MAHARAJA’S MISERY!

SUNNY THOMAS

When pilots, duty-bound to fly aircraft strike work and disrupt your flight schedule, you might call it treason. And when doctors, duty-bound to save life go on strike and kill the poorest of the poor, you call it treason, too. But when Parliamentarians disrupt Parliament and write their Script of Disruption, which the rest of the nation enacts, would you call it treason?

To recapitulate the Maharaja’s misery is to trace the glory that was Air India under JRD Tata, its spectacular growth in fleet and crew, its monumental mismanagement, and its hijacking and grounding of flights by a bunch of irresponsible pilots.  

It is difficult to believe that Air India started its operation from a palm-thatched hut at Juhu aerodrome. The airline then had just one pilot, two apprentice mechanics and two piston-engine aircraft. The year was 1932 and it was known as Tata Airlines.

After World War II, the aviation industry across the world started expanding. In 1946 Tata Airlines became a public limited company and in 1948 was rechristened as Air India. JRD was the first Indian to pass the pilot’s examination, and his historic flying from Karachi to Juhu airport on October 15, 1932, was celebrated in the aviation history.   

JRD was a charismatic person who believed that every obstacle is an opportunity. Groomed by a Scottish business leader, John Peterson, who headed Tata Sons after his tenure in Indian Civil Service, the young Tata was educated in France, Japan and England, imbibing the virtues of all the cultures. However, he had one regret in life that he could not take an engineering degree from Cambridge, as his father wanted him back home.  

When JRD was 22, his father died, and ever since then he was on the board of Tata & Sons.  He was born in Paris because his mother Suzanne (`Sooni’) was a French national, but at the age of 25 he surrendered his French citizenship and started devoting himself to building Modern India, with a strong industrial foundation. 

The Golden Age of Air India was indeed JRD’s tenure as Chairman. But in 1977 when Morarjee Desai became Prime Minister, he was not happy with Tata and wanted him replaced. From then on, it was a story of steady decline for the airlines, which showed itself from time to time, though on paper business was growing. 

Vir Sanghvi, the former editor of The Hindustan Times, describes the moment thus: Being Morarji Desai –  by which I mean, a bit of a crank and a nutcase – he chose not just to punish JRD but also to punish Air India. So he sacked JRD as Chairman of Air India… Once JRD went, the babus moved in. Air India became a plaything of the civil aviation ministry and the handmaiden of the government, used and abused by ministers and bureaucrats. (JRD himself accepted only Re 1 a year as salary).  

The merger of Air India with the loss-making Indian Airlines was a fatal mistake. Instead of saving the sick airline, both airlines became sick and a national liability. The combined loss of Air India and Indian Airlines touched Rs 7.7 billion in March 2007, which went up to Rs 72 billion in March 2009.

In 2011, the airline missed salary payments and interest payments (for June, July, August) to creditors like State Bank of India, inviting Moody’s warning. Its decision to buy 111 new aircraft as part of the modernization drive has put Air India deep in the red.

The airline’s poor customer care and abysmal passenger rating (4.1 out of 10) is indefensible. It tells a tale of low morale and dismal management. Already, the government squandered Rs 32 billion in April 2009 and another Rs 67.5 billion in March 2012, double the government budget for new hospitals in the last three years!

It is time the government realized that the job of the government is not to run airlines but to run the government efficiently. Improve the plight of government hospitals in the country, open more rural health centres, improve the quality of primary education, and take care of the malnourished, whose population puts India in a dubious first – which India can do without.  

The pilots, by any stretch of imagination, are not malnourished! Robbing India’s malnourished to pay the pilots who don’t fly their aircraft is a crime we must put an end to immediately.   

 The government has only two options: sell the aircraft to a consortium of industrialists or even to foreign players who can run the airlines creditably; or sack all the pilots who have gone on strike three times in two years, and appoint a Chairman who could be a former pilot or someone who knows how to run the aviation business profitably (even the private airline owners who do a meritorious job could be considered).    

It is indeed time the government ended the Maharaja’s misery!